294 of Göta High Court’s judgements shows how the use of the death penalty steadily declined from this initial figure. During the period 1655—1664, the high court thus revoked 104 of the death sentences passed by the lower courts and confirmed 72 of them. During the last period of study, 1681—1699, the number of confirmed death sentences had fallen to 48. The change is striking: during the sixty years between the 1630s and the 1690s, the death sentences confirmed by the high court decreased from160 to 72 to 48. This tendency was clearest in sexual offences and thefts but not so noticeable in violent crimes. Where the issue was decided by the high court, it reduced the number of death sentences by 70 per cent. This leads us to reflect over the reasons. The justices in the high court were subject to religiously founded demands for severe punishments. The view that “the purpose of punishment is to propitiate our great God” lived on throughout the seventeenth century.' There was a latent pressure, from these views inspired by the Old Testament, to pass death sentences and avoid other penalties such as fines. In God’s Law in the Appendix, for many crimes there was no alternative but “to die the death”. At the same time, other religious views based on the NewTestament were put forward, about mercy and forgiveness. All the circumstances in a case had to be examined to see whether “it would be Christian to spare his life”, as the ordinance on trials prescribed.^ At the ideological level there were two messages, one about severity, another about lenience. On 1,342 occasions the high court had to decide whether a death sentence should be executed or not. The court rarely referred to the penalties in God’s Law, and just as rarely described its reasons for showing lenience as “Christian”, but, as the figures show, as time went by it showed increasingly lenience. A thesis that has been put forward in international research is that, in times of population crisis or manpower shortage, criminals are not condemned to death but to labour."^ There is no support for this thesis in the practice of Göta High Court. Nor can the many mitigated sentences be explained by the crown’s need for income fromfines. These were often not collected in reality, since the convict could not pay and had his sentence changed to corporal punishment or banishment. The increasing tendency of the high court to show mercy went hand in hand with the practice of investigating the circumstances of a case in increasing detail. The competence to judge these rose as a result of better training and longer experience. There was also an increase in the tendency to search more thoroughly for justifications for milder sentences. The behaviour of the high court reflects a typical feature of the justice of the day. Eva Österberg has described this as a combination of “cruelty and realistic ^ Henrik Munktell 1936, p. 147. ^ Schmedeman, p. 47. ■' G. Rushe &O. Kirchheimer 1939.
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